Courtesy of Judith Gregg Librarian Catherine Arbogast heads out with a personalized book delivery from the Los Altos main library.

Love of learning and curiosity about the world sometimes grow only more urgent as a person spends more and more time at home, limited by age, health condition, or both. Librarians head out from the Los Altos main l...

Already known as an innovator in the tech field, Google Inc. is now moving in on the art world.

The Mountain View-based company July 11 launched the “Paint the Town” contest, a “moving art experiment” that invites California residents over the age of 13 to submit physical or digital artwork that would decorate the door...

Traci Newell/Town Crier The six-week, tuition-free Stretch to Kindergarten program, hosted at Bullis Charter School, serves children who have not attended preschool. A teacher leads children in singing about the parts of a butterfly, above.

courtesy of Rishi Bommannan Rishi Bommannan cycled from Bates College in Maine to his home in Los Altos Hills, taking several selfies along the way. He also raised nearly $13,000 for the Livestrong Foundation, which supports cancer patients.

The Town Crier’s recent article on coyotes venturing down from the foothills in search of sustenance referenced the organization Project Coyote (“Recent coyote attacks keep residents on edge,” July 1). Do not waste your time contac...

Photos by Alicia Castro/Town Crier Local residents participate in an exercise class at the Grant Park Senior Center, above. Betsy Reeves, below left with Gail Enenstein, lobbied for senior programming in south Los Altos.

Grace Wilson Franks, our beloved mother and grandmother, left us peacefully on July 16, 2015 just a few weeks short of her 92nd birthday. She was born to Ross and Florence (Cruzan) Wilson in rural Tulare, California on Septem...

Most of us have a place inside our hearts and minds that occasionally causes us trouble. For some, it is sadness, depression or despair. For others, it may be fear, anger, resentment or myriad other emotional “dark places” that at times seem to hij...

I need a cellphone that suits me better, and by “suits me better” I mean something that cooperates with my face and head. On my current phone, my cheek hits two highly inconvenient points on the screen: the mute button and the speaker button. As a result, when I smile broadly or move my head a little, I hit one of those buttons, and suddenly voices are being broadcast all over the supermarket, or I hear that confused someone on the other end desperately querying, “Hello? Hello?” even as I’m in mid-sentence.

This isn’t the first time the size and shape of my head has given me trouble. Having one wider than average has forced river-rafting guides to scramble to hunt down a helmet that would fit me.

A triple-threat combination of high cheekbones, wide head and no bridge for my nose inspires my ophthalmologist at every exam to brag that his assistant, Bill, is a whiz at finding the right frame for every patient. “Even for people like you,” he says with a reassuring smile. And sure enough, Bill eventually finds a couple of good choices but stares at me long and hard before he summons the wherewithal to peruse the drawers and displays. A salesperson at LensCrafters – a self-proclaimed whiz herself with eyewear fittings – once said to me, “Well, your face is really hard to fit. But that makes it pretty easy to choose a frame – there won’t be many options for you to look at.”

I give credit to both Bill and LensCrafters for coming up with suitable styles, but I am mollified by the thought that among normal-headed persons, I must look like my dog did when he had to wear one of those plastic cones that prevented him from licking his sutures.

I’ve tried to comfort myself with the idea that a large head must mean I have more brain matter, but those so-called senior moments that occur with increasing regularity have proven me laughably wrong.

So basically I just have a big fat head – nothing more, nothing less. That means that when I walk into the Sprint store, I’ll have to describe the problem with my face and cellphone screens without a loftier explanation for why I have to be cautious in such a peculiar way.

Short of getting a lobotomy, there’s nothing I can really do about it, so I will just have to, as they say in Britain, keep calm and carry on – except, of course, when I’m on my cell and my cheek hits the wrong button, putting me in conference-call mode with a third party I never intended to dial.

However, a new iPhone or Galaxy may be my ticket out of mobile-phone misery, so I’m going shopping for a new phone soon. But right after that, I’m going to look for a hat to wear at a family wedding scheduled to occur on the beach in August. Good luck to me.

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